


The Haunting of Stanley Uris

by cathedraltunes



Series: Tooth & Crow [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Birds, Eastern European Folklore, Fix-It, Gen, Horror, Judaism, Religion, Suicide Attempt, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:26:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23055436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathedraltunes/pseuds/cathedraltunes
Summary: After a strange phone call, Stanley Uris attempts suicide. His wife saves his life when she finds him; but the man that wakes up scant days later is not the man she married. If she means to save her husband, to truly save him, Patricia Blum must descend into Derry, Maine, and confront the thing that now lives there in the nest some other evil left behind.Fortunately for her, she has the Losers to help.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris & Beverly Marsh, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Series: Tooth & Crow [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1944244
Comments: 48
Kudos: 105





	1. prologue.

**Author's Note:**

> I got tired of constantly plotting and replotting this, so let's just get going already.
> 
> General content warnings: Stan attempts suicide. Eddie is dead. Unhappy and difficult family relationships abound. Horror. Deadlights, referenced. It gets worse before it gets better.
> 
> Obviously the focus here is on Patty and Stan, but Richie/Eddie will come into play in the final act. If you're here for the Reddie: sorry, my dudes, but it's gonna be a while. Beverly/Ben exists in the background.
> 
> I will try to update at least once a week. If I'm able to update more frequently, then I will do so. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!

> And Ruth said, “Do not entreat me to leave you, to return from following you, for wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. 
> 
> “Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. So may the Lord do to me and so may He continue, if anything but death separate me and you."

Rut.

  
  


> Stand here and name the one you loved  
>  beneath the drifting ashes;  
>  and in naming, rise above time  
>  as it, flashing, passes.

Joanna Newsom, Kingfisher.

  
  


  
  


prologue.

In a small and private room tucked down a wide hall in the Grady Memorial Hospital’s intensive care unit, the patient slept as he had slept without waking for the last three days. They did not know when he would wake or if he would wake. This did not comfort the wife. She visited for most of the day each day as the hospital permitted. In the evening the nurses not without sympathy turned her out and she went, pale-faced and bright-eyed, in her soft cardigans and smart jeans.

What a tragedy, one nurse would say.

Can’t imagine if it was me, the other would agree. 

How did you survive something like that, a husband trying suicide? they neither of them said. To have said it would be unkind. No one is privy to a marriage but those who live within it. Why had he done it? Was it the wife? Was it the job? Sometimes you could look in and see the wife crying over him and you would think, What an asshole to do that to her. Then you’d put on a gentle smile for the wife and offer tissues. She would not know what things you had thought about this man.

The chart at the foot of the bed described in clinical detail much of the event. The wife (Patricia Uris) found the patient (Stanley Uris) in the master bath with his wrists slit longitudinally. The wife bound the patient’s wrists and arms with bath towels. The wife called 911 at 9:32PM. An ambulance responded to the scene at 9:40PM. The patient was comatose at this time. The patient was assessed as having lost two and one half liters of blood. The patient has a history of obsessive compulsive disorder. The patient received emergency surgery to close the incisions. The patient will require reconstructive surgery to the left wrist (right hand dominant).

The hour was late. On the rolling machines that surrounded the bed and monitored such things as pulse, blood pressure, brain activity, breathing regularity, etc., the time showed as 2:11AM. It was May in Atlanta, Georgia, and in the tree that grew outside the one window in the room a bird began softly to call. An owl, perhaps: some night bird with a low voice. 

The machines did not react. In the bed, his arms firmly bandaged, an IV tube feeding between two fingers of his right hand, the patient had opened his eyes. He had dark eyes, grey. These eyes looked unmoving at the ceiling. The ceiling was porous board, light enough to lift with two hands. He’d natural bruising around his eyes. The event had worsened these. He looked owlish himself. 

The bird called lowly again. Who are you, who are you? In the muggy dark a wind moved through the branches. The heavy leaves trembled. The bird walked along the wood, claws scratching through bark. It said: who? 

The man made tiny fragile movements with his fingers. The fingers of the left hand did not well respond. His eyes flicked. He looked not at his hands or the white bandages of his arms, but to the window, to the night. If a nurse had come in then and looked at his eyes, they would have known he looked at something far from here, at some thing in the distance though the world outside the window was largely black and pocked only with stars and the glimmering nighttime lights of other rooms.

His breath came evenly. He watched. The bird said, “Stanley Uris.” Very slowly he blinked. “Stanley Uris,” said the bird. 

The man in the bed said, “Stanley Uris isn’t here,” in a polite and dry voice. Then he closed his eyes. He straightened his head on the pillow and then his fingers on the sheets. The thumb of his left hand would not move at all.

Outside in the tree the great bird rubbed its wings against its sleek body. Then it startled. A crow, ink-feathered and lean, alighted on the branch above it and spread its own black wings darker even than the night. The crow said, “Maturin, maturin,” and the owl leapt clumsily out of the tree as the crow shouted after it: “ _maturin, maturin_ ,” a hoarse thing that continued long after the owl had gone and the man in the room at the end of the hall had gone away again to another place distant and strange. 

The crow paced the branch. Every now and then it tipped its head, eye gleaming, and looked through the glass at the man; and it did this until the dawn when the sun came licking hot just shy of the horizon. Then, shaking out its wings, the crow took flight. It circled the hospital three times. Another crow joined it, then a third. More. They moved darkly over the city then turned east and to the south, to the house on 1001 Rivertree Drive, where Patricia Blum lived with her husband, Stanley.


	2. 1.1

###### 

Signs posted along the stretch of road before the airport terminal announced NO PARKING. PICK-UPS AND DROP-OFFS ONLY. She drove forward with care down that long road, mindful of the lane devoted to taxis and other paid transports. Had Ruth checked any bags? Eyes most certainly on the road, and the broad sidewalk to the right, she felt for her phone on the dash; then she spotted Ruth, leggy and tall with her dark hair in a curling tail high on her head.

Patty signaled and turned neatly in to the nearest spot to where Ruth stood. Her little sister, now twenty-six and several inches her better, squinted at the familiar reddish sedan. She lit. Patty put the brake on and sidled out the driver’s side door. The humidity, skin-sticking and heavy on the shoulders, fogged her glasses a moment.

“Ruth,” she called, but her sister had already scurried forward along the sidewalk, dropped her duffel on the curb, and come around the front of the car to hug Patty. 

“I love you,” said Ruth, her long arms wound about Patty’s back. “I love you, I love you.”

Patty leaned her chin on her sister’s shoulder. She smiled briefly. Her hands cupped Ruth’s shoulders. 

“Hey, Roo,” she said. “Did you check any bags?”

Ruth let Patty push her back. As ever Ruth had elected to wear a t-shirt their parents would have found offensive: a four-horned goat with its tongue out and human hands uplifted, middle fingers flashing. 

“Oh, Ruth,” Patty sighed.

Grinning, Ruth said, “Not a one. Checked bag.” She talked as she got her duffel and Patty went to pop the trunk. “I’m trying to travel light. You know, I got so much shit and I’m always dragging it around everywhere, well, I got an e-reader so good-bye to the traveling library.”

She closed the trunk on the duffel and went to the passenger-side door. Patty had already buckled back in. The doors closed. The brake disengaged. Patty checked the mirrors twice and began pulling back into traffic.

Ruth wiggled in the passenger seat. As the last person to have rode in that seat was their father, it was pushed back far enough that Ruth could comfortably stretch her legs out before her. She did so with relish.

“I thought Mom and Dad were gonna pick me up.”

Patty signaled to merge into outgoing traffic. “They weren’t able to come up.”

“Hm, hm, hm!” said Ruth. “So what did he do now? Or what did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Patty. “It isn’t important.”

“He said something shitty about Stan, didn’t he.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Ruth made disagreeable sounds but for once she held her tongue. She did eye Patty though through her light, wire-framed glasses, more delicate than the tortoiseshell frames Patty liked.

“I hope this didn’t mess up anything with your school,” said Patty without looking. They moved onto one of the arterial roads leading from the airport and into Atlanta. “You had exams, right?”

“My thesis supervisor is cool,” Ruth said, “I talked to her and the department head and I took a couple of the exams early. I’ll do one on-line on Friday. You’ve got wi-fi, right? Or the hotel will, I don’t know.”

“No, we have wi-fi at the house. Um, you won’t be staying at the hotel,” Patty said. “Mom and Dad, they’re going to use the room. So you’ll be staying at the house. There’s the guest room downstairs. I just have to change the sheets.”

“Aw, Kanga, I can change the dang sheets,” Ruth scoffed. “You know I’m, like, a grown-ass woman. So Dad said something extra super shitty.”

Tree-lined neighborhoods passed them. Atlanta was in rich bloom, a colorful kaleidoscope of flowering trees lining the walks. A red light ahead urged Patty to slow.

“He.” Patty flexed her fingers around the steering wheel. Her throat clicked. She would not cry again, she thought ferociously. She hadn’t the tears in her. “Well. He was Dad.”

“He’s a bitch.”

“Language!”

The light turned green. Patty moved them through the intersection. Her cheeks ticked.

“He is!” said Ruth defensively. She threw herself back in her seat and crossed her arms. “Look, whatever. I don’t care. I have to fake like I don’t think he’s an asshole so he’ll cover school but you know he’s an asshole. Mom shouldn’t have brought him.”

“They’re here to help.”

“That’s not why he’s here.”

Patty breathed evenly. She worked her fingers again, stretching the knuckles so they wouldn’t lock. “They’re here to help with. Everything. There’s a lot of medical things I have to take care of right now, and of course the junior accountants are having to handle the firm, and they’re just worried about, about me and. Stan.”

Ruth snorted and in that too mean way she had of speaking without thought said, “He probably said something about how Stan should have done it before you got married,” and then covered her mouth and went pale under her dusk honey skin.

Patty did not pull the car over. She had already done that once today. She was tremendously tired and she could not bear the thought of setting back the time table again, so that she would spend more time away from the hospital. The hours shortened. She could only visit for so long each day.

Rather than pull the car over, Patty coasted the car to a stop for the next red light in the midst of this grand residential neighborhood and she looked over at her little sister and she said, “Ruth Daphne, don’t you dare,” her voice twanging with a sudden Georgian snap. She faced forward again. Her fingers had gone tense around the wheel. She forced them gentle.

Two large family cars passed through the intersection. A teenager drove one of them. He was laughing. The colonial-style homes with their great oaks and elms stood sedately back in their green yards. The sun blazed ahead but in the air was a scent of rain, unsmelt in the car where the air conditioning went on puffing out cold wind.

Ruth said, “I’m sorry,” quietly.

Patty didn’t say anything. The light turned green. She pressed her foot to the accelerator. They stayed silent the rest of the drive out of Atlanta proper and into the sprawling suburbs, to Rivertree Drive where The Residence, as Stanley called it, stood far back in a copse of tall dark trees with a winding cobblestoned road emerging from the front of it like the tongue of some odd beast.

  
  


1001 Rivertree Lane, built in 1982, was a house of red brick exterior and within, gleaming hardwood floors and high ceilings. Two stories tall, it boasted a small unfinished cellar, where Stan and Patty kept wine bottles in diamond wire racks. Jars, too, of homemade jams and canned fruits and vegetables bought at the farmer’s markets so plentiful here in the south, these kept on plain shelving units made by Stan one afternoon. The shelves were perhaps crooked. A nail stuck out very slightly from the third shelf up on the case by the stairs. Patty had put a rubber eraser over it like a bumper. 

The ground floor contained kitchen, living room, dining room, Stan’s office, and a guest bedroom with its own door leading to the sprawling, wooded yard out back. This was the room where Herbert and Rachel Blum had slept until that very morning.

Ruth followed Patty into the house with her duffel slung across her back and her hands deep in her jeans pockets. She had a rainbow pin stuck to the duffel among the usual assortment of punk enamel pins and esoteric occult badges. Patty had noticed this as Ruth hefted the duffel out of the trunk.

“Shoes,” Patty called over her shoulder. “Don’t you track any mud in this house.”

“Yes, Mama,” Ruth shouted after her. 

The laundry room was situated between the study and the guest bedroom. Patty gathered the sheets out of the dryer and carted them into the bedroom, where the stripped mattress waited to be made presentable once more. She sorted through the sheets and set aside small things cleaned in the same load. 

Wandering, Ruth came to the room. Patty had straightened the fitted sheet and was fighting with the second corner. 

“C’mon, Kanga, let me get it.”

“No, no. Get some water. You’ve been traveling.”

“Just let me do it, I know how to make a bed too.”

“Can I please make this bed?” 

Patty pounded her hands flat on the mattress. The second corner of the fitted sheet popped free. Her breath came too harshly in her throat. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut behind her glasses. 

Ruth’s bare feet sounded minutely on the floorboards. She said, “Patty,” and her fingertips brushed at Patty’s arms.

Shaking her head, Patty stepped away from Ruth. “Not right now,” she said in a very even voice.

There, Ruth hesitated. Her hands, long-boned and turned out as if to beseech, hovered between them. Then she dropped them and rubbed at her jeans and said, “Okay. Sure. Thanks, Pat.”

“There’s some cold cuts in the fridge, too.”

“Yeah, sure,” Ruth said, “yeah. I’m pretty hungry after the flight. Um. Do you want me to grab you anything?”

Patty put on a smile. She said, “No, I’ll fix something in a little bit,” and Ruth lingered there in the hallway outside the room before padding away down the other hall, the one that led to the guest bathroom and, beyond that, the kitchen.

She made the bed with quick and smoothing motions, taking the time to pull out each fold. The windows that looked out on the sprawling back yard gave her an open view of the trees. The crows were back. Patty smiled to see them, dark birds calling to each other from the trees or walking the grass, their glossy beaks turned down. 

“Your murder’s here,” Stan would say. “Would they like the fresh kill?”

“Ha ha,” Patty would say. “That’s a very funny joke, Stan.”

Her husband would look at her, solemn and eyes lidded. “It is funny, isn’t it?”

“Because it’s called a murder.”

“Yes,” he would say without so much as a tremble at the corner of his mouth to give away the laugh. 

“Ha ha ha,” said Patty tremblingly to the bed. She tensed her throat against the shuddering. Eventually it passed. She pulled the duvet up then folded it half back. The pillows, half in cases, half embroidered with little white birds, she arranged artfully at the headboard. 

Going to the windows, she looked at the crows. There was still half a loaf of sourdough in the microwave. She would feed the crows scraps and crumbs, and when she was human again she would go to the hospital to see Stan and hold his cool hand, the one that didn’t have an IV feed run through it.

Patty took the folded washcloths with her. In the kitchen Ruth was sitting at the little round table and talking to Rabbi Uris. Patty hesitated short of the kitchen, but he had seen her. He stood over the stove, over a tin kettle set on a burner glowing muted red. The kettle had come from the kitchen closet Stan and Patty jokingly referred to as The Kosher Cabinet, for visitors like their parents or friends who did not consume treif.

“So I’ve really been trying to dig into it,” Ruth was saying as she cut her way through a triple-stacked sandwich. “Like, how Slavic folklore has influenced Jewish folklore and vice verse.”

Patty ducked into the kitchen. She put the washcloths away in the drawer by the sink. This left a tidy, folded white bundle of linen in her hand. She took a breath and went to Stan’s father at the stove. She had to step over the cellar door to do so, and she did her best not to think of it as it gave very slightly under her foot.

Donald looked briefly to her. 

“Thank you,” she said softly to him, “for earlier. That was very kind of you.” She pressed the handkerchief, embroidered with _uris._ into his large, skinny hand.

He said, “Of course,” and nodded. Gratitude swelled in her that he said nothing else, not about what her father had said or how she had parked the car on the side of the highway. Rabbi Uris only turned his attention to the kettle and said, “I’m making tea. Would you like a cup?”

“No, thank you,” said Patty. She opened the microwave and got out the loaf of bread, ziplocked for freshness. It was well past that by now. “I’m going to feed my crows and then I’ll go to the hospital. Did you want to come with me?”

The rabbi poured hot water into the mug he’d chosen, an earthenware mug that Stanley favored. He said, “I’ll visit later. You should have time with your husband.”

“And I’m going to get my stuff settled in,” said Ruth. “Um. Unless you’d like me to come? Just,” she said hurriedly, “if I won’t be in the way.”

Patty looked at her sister. Her heart ached. She wished she hadn’t snapped at her so in the car, and yet she wasn’t sorry that she had. That’s my Stan, she had wanted to say. That’s _my_ Stan and he might die and I will never know why and I will have to go on living without him so how can you say something like that? How can you even say something like that? Maybe Herbert Blum was an asshole but he hadn’t said that. 

She said, “Hop along, Roo,” meaning you come, too, and Ruth smiled with her cheeks full of beef salami.

Patty took the bread out back. The crows quieted then burst into conversation. She tipped her face up to the sun and to the trees, and the crow with the grey hood across its back chattered at her.

“Okay, all right, hold on,” said Patty. “Greedykins. You’re as bad as the kids in my class.”

She tore a stale strip of bread from the loaf and tossed it to the hooded crow, who was after all her favorite, though she would never admit to such things. A little pang nipped her. The kids, she thought. How would she explain to them? The substitute would have told the kindergartners that Mrs Uris’ husband was sick.

The birds lighted in the grass and plucked their way across the earth around her. Patty scattered handfuls of bread to them. Raucous, full-throated, the birds called to her and ate to their satisfaction.

  
  


“Your crows are back,” said Stan, in mock-tones of disapproval.

“I like crows,” said Patty, absently paging through the new Vogue Knitting. “Aren’t they silly things?” 

“Silly things! They’re very serious birds.”

She laughed. “They aren’t serious, Stan, they’re funny little clowns.”

“Harbingers of death,” said Stan, suddenly aloof. 

“You look a little like a crow,” said Patty. “Dark hair. Your silver glasses. Crows like shiny things.”

Stan hummed. He sat at last beside her on the loveseat. She’d curled up on it with her feet on the far cushion, and so to sit he lifted her legs and put her feet in his lap. He stroked lightly at her calves.

“You do wear a lot of jewelry.”

“Then you shouldn’t buy me so many necklaces.”

“You look good in them.” He said it matter-of-factly as he always said it when he said sweet things to her, as if they weren’t matters of romance but matters of truth. “I like it when you layer your necklaces.”

“And the chains tangle and it takes me an hour to take them off every night.”

He leaned closer. His shoulders bunched. A little hair showed through the gap at his shirt collar. 

“I could help you take them off.” 

“And steal them, crow.”

“To make the nest pretty,” Stan murmured to her lips. “So you’ll choose to stay.”

Patty shivered against him. Her toes curled against his thigh. She pressed her nose to his nose. They rubbed gently.

“I already chose that,” she said.

“What about when spring comes? You’ll have to reevaluate.” He withdrew enough to look somberly at her. “What if the nest I build isn’t up to snuff?”

“Oh, Stan,” said Patty, “just shut up and kiss me,” and he’d laughed, one of his fine few laughs, and he did kiss her. They’d kissed each other so much that night there on the loveseat and then again upstairs in their own room, his hair dark and curling against the white sheets, his eyes bright, her three necklaces half-tangled and swaying between her breasts, gliding lightly across his chest. 

They were clever birds, crows. Talking birds. A crow remembered faces. It remembered words. It loved, too, as a bird could love. 

She kissed him longly there in the dark and Stan ran his warm hand up her back and caught his fingers in her gold-brown hair and stroked the strands like they were cornsilk or straw found caught in the thin and brittle fingers of a tree.

After, he untangled her necklaces for her with deft and fine movements of his fingers. Each necklace, drawn straight, he laid neatly out on the small table on her side of the bed. Three doubled lines of chain, silver, that he pulled straight with a finger on each pendant.

"Magpie," said Patty sleepily.

"Babylove," he said in turn, and they kissed each other slowly.

  
  


“I thought the rabbi would shit if he saw my shirt.”

“Language,” said Patty. She knew the route to the hospital well enough now. “You brought it up first, didn’t you?”

“He was looking at it,” Ruth protested. She had a leg crossed, the ankle up on the opposite knee. She picked at the chucks as she talked. “But do you know what he said? He said—” Ruth put on a voice. “Is this a Christian house? Then it doesn’t matter.” 

It wasn’t a very good voice. Patty laughed anyway, and the laugh startled her. She clapped a hand to her mouth and navigated the turn at the intersection, still shaking.

“I couldn’t believe it! Isn’t he like, super duper ultra Orthodox? Like, ah, crap. What is it? Shut up, stop laughing. I’ll remember.”

Patty mouthed it at her and Ruth said, “Haredi!”

“Not Haredi. Just an altercocker,” Patty murmured, remembering. She had to bite another laugh back, this one bitter-tinged. 

“Well, if Dad saw this shirt, ah! God take this four-eyed child from me. What did he ever do to earn such a daughter?”

Patty said primly, “HaShem take this four-eyed child,” and Ruth laughed. 

“Do you think God is angry with me?” 

“Everyone’s always angry with you.”

“It’s my bad mouth,” said Ruth, “it reflects my bad heart. Not like you, of course, most righteous daughter.”

“Not so righteous.” She stroked three fingers along the steering wheel. They moved deeper into the heart of Atlanta, pushing on to the towering Gradys. “Not this morning. I didn’t feel like a very good daughter.”

Ruth was quiet. She could do that sometimes. Traffic thickened. They lingered at a string of red lights.

“Do you want to tell me?” Ruth asked shyly. 

Fourteen years stood between them. At times when Ruth spoke with Patty she spoke as if Patty were like a mother or an aunt, someone of greater substance than merely an older sister. 

Patty said, “Not right now.”

“Okay. I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it. You don’t have to talk about it.”

She drew in a breath. The air of the car was cold, artificial. A stink of diesel penetrated. She said, dreading despite his absence her father’s response, “I want to tell Stan first.”

Ruth said, “Okay,” as subdued. She untied the laces of her flower-printed black converse then began knotting them again. “Um. How is he?”

Patty concentrated on the driving for a time, as the traffic swelled around them and the lights changed out of sync with one another at their respective intersections. So much of her life she lived in the car now, a transient woman shuttling from the house where all her joy had lived to the white hospital room where Stan slept undreaming and nothing she said to him did a lick of good. 

What could she say to Ruth? This was the girl who had cried when her Kanga went off to Barnard. Ruth hadn’t started school herself; she was only four, and she had scraped her knee so badly the week before they had to take her to get stitches. The first summer Patty brought Stan home to meet her folks, Ruth had poured apple sauce in his shoes.

“Why would you do that, Roo?” Patty asked. Their parents had delegated it to her. Her boyfriend, her sister: “And anyway,” said Rachel Blum, “she listens to you better than me.”

“Because I hate him!” her six-year old sister had shouted. “He’s stupid and he’s ugly! I hope he gets bugs up his nose! I hope they eat his stupid brain!” 

Stan had watched this with his mouth quirking at the corners.

“You don’t wish that, Roo,” said Patty firmly, “that isn’t kind. I know that you’re jealous of Stan, but he’s here and he’s our guest, and that means we have to be kind. We’re _good hosts_.”

“I do wish it!” Ruth said loudly. “I wish his whole brain gets bugs!”

“I think she does wish it,” Stan had said lightly. “She’s very insistent.”

“I do mean it! I do!”

“See?” said Stan. He’d crouched then, plucking at his trousers as he did so that the fabric didn’t catch tight around his knees. To Ruth he said, “I’m sorry. But bugs can’t eat into the human brain through the nose.”

Ruth made a face. “They can’t?”

“No. Your sinuses—” He touched either side of his nose. “They’re closed off with a membrane. That membrane surrounds your brain. Like shrink wrap.”

Ruth thought, looking mulish. Her black curls were short then. She’d got gum in her hair and then tried to brush it out. 

“Okay,” said Ruth. “I’ll put ‘em in your ears.”

He shook his head. “Same problem.” This time he tapped a finger to her left ear, then her right year. Ruth laughed. “Your ear drums would stop them.”

“You can’t get brain bugs?”

Now, he nodded. He did it seriously, as he had everything throughout their conversation. “Only viral bugs. Like meningitis.”

Ruth thought about this. Her nose screwed up. Then she too nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “I hope you get mengigis.”

Stan held his hand out to her. Ruth shook it. Some years later, when he asked when it was she’d known she loved him, Patty turned her head to his shoulder and said, “When Roo told you to get brainworms and die.” This was still a few years before Ruth began spending summers with them.

Stan said, “Oh, that’s right. I remember that. She put gravy in my shoes, do you remember that?” He held Patty nearer to him on the couch. Law & Order returned from the commercial break.

“Apple sauce,” Patty said as the familiar title card sound effect bonged. “She put apple sauce in your shoes.”

Stan smiled at that. “Those were the only shoes I brought. I had to call my dad to wire me money so I could buy another pair.”

“My parents would have bought you a pair.”

He snorted. “And suffer Herbert Blum’s charity?”

“Well, you’ve suffered enough of that.”

“What about you?”

“I,” said Patty, “would never say a word against my father. Because I am a good daughter. But _sugar_ , Stanley, I wanted to shake Ruth.”

“She was just being a brat,” said Stan. “How would you have felt if your big sister brought a man home from college and stayed out all day with him?”

“I wouldn’t have poured apple sauce in his shoes.”

“No, you would’ve just hidden them. Somewhere no one could find them. And you’d forget.”

Patty pinched the back of his hand, hung over her shoulder, his fingers light on her breast. Then she took his hand up by the wrist and kissed the spot she’d pinched so he’d know she was so very sorry.

“It was just so strange,” Patty said. “I went away and she changed so much in just two years. Two years! And kids change, of course they do, my kids change just over the year, but.”

Stan hummed. He was looking at the television, his eyes sleepy-seeming behind his glasses. He stroked her breast gently with the tips of his fingers. 

“You changed, too.”

It was her turn to snort, and she did snort. “I don’t think I’ve ever changed a day in my life. I think I’ve always been like this.” The words came out all wrong. She sounded wistful or perhaps even outright sad. It had cut too close to a truth, that she, Patricia Dorothy Blum-Uris, was simply boring: passive, sweet, good. The same now as she was then.

Her husband turned to look at her. Light from the television glinted off his glasses. His eyes were shadowed things behind the lenses. 

He said, “Patty Blum, you’re the most exciting person I know.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said, and she pretended to bite his nose, thinking he might laugh. He didn’t laugh – Stan so rarely did – but he did smile his little, calm smile, and he leaned down to brush his lips across hers.

I love you, she’d thought. I love you. Her heart had shivered inside her like the wings of a small bird, readying for flight.

  
  


Now they had come to the hospital, and Ruth followed Patty through the labyrinthine corridors, fluorescent-lit and bleach stinking. There was the guest check-in of course and the nurse who assured Patty the doctor on staff would be happy to speak with her if she’d any concerns or needs. 

She had told Ruth the truth or as much of it as she could: that Stan was comatose, that he had lost a great deal of blood and despite the transfusions his body still struggled to replenish its supply. She used those precise words, “to replenish its supply.” His vital signs were mostly stable. It was only that he would not wake up.

Coming into the room, Patty shucked her purse and set it in one of the visitor’s chairs against the wall.

“Hello, Stanley,” she said, trying for cheer. “I’m sorry for being so late today. There were errands, and I had to pick up Ruth from the airport.” 

She bustled around the bed, doing the small, absurd things a wife would do for a husband sick at home. She checked the sheet; she touched the pillow under his head; she felt the chill of his hands. Her heart was sick with the laugh of it.

“Hey, Stan,” said Ruth. She slouched over to the hospital bed. She’d taken her hair out of its ponytail in the car and when she bent to kiss Stan’s forehead her curls fell across her face, across his too.

He didn’t sneeze. He didn’t flinch. Of course he could do neither. His face was lax and alien in its absolute stillness, so different from his usual calm. 

Ruth stepped back from the bed. Her shoulders had pulled up tight. She said, “Oh, shit, Patty,” wobbling, and Patty though she was so very heart-tired got up and went to hold Ruth as she teared. 

“He really is—” Ruth hid her face in Patty’s shoulder.

“Shh,” said Patty, petting her hair down her nape. “Hey, Roo. Sit a while, Roo.”

She held Ruth all the long minutes that Ruth cried. Kanga’s got Roo, Patty would say to two-year old Ruth when she’d skinned a knee or cut a lip. Roo’s got me too. Ruth’s tears dampened her cotton blouse. Patty made loving noise and stroked her through it.

At last Ruth shuddered. She drew away to wipe at her eyes. 

“Sorry. Sorry, Patty. It’s not— You shouldn’t have to, um.”

“Don’t apologize,” said Patty. “It’s all right. You were with us a long time.”

Ruth nodded. Her jaw trembled. Her nose was red and runny, her eyelashes wetly clumped. She wiped at her nose with her wrist.

“There’s a restroom down the hall if you need it. And a vending machine by the nurse’s station,” said Patty.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’ll be right back.”

Patty ran her hand from Ruth’s shoulder to her elbow. She squeezed once.

“I’ll be here. Me and Stan.”

Nodding again, nodding like a broken bobblehead, Ruth mumbled a thanks and slipped out into the hallway, her skinny back hunched and her long legs flying.

In the absence of her, Patty sagged. She looked at the hallway.

“Stan,” she said, in a voice surely too old to be her voice, “I’m just so tired.” She scrubbed at her eyes and went to close the door. When she’d done so, Patty picked her bag up out of the chair and tugged the chair to his bedside. 

She couldn’t say anymore. It felt too cruel a thing to say it out loud. Stan, she thought, I’m so damn tired of having to carry everyone else’s grief too. I’m so sugar-loaded _tired_ of saying thank you for thinking of us, thank you for cooking for us, thank you for your lovely note. 

Patty checked his feet. The hospital dressed him in nice, rubber-bottomed socks, but they allowed her to redress him in wool if she liked. It wasn’t as if he did much walking around the room. Patty stripped the hospital socks from his bony feet with the crooked big toes and rolled a brown wool sock over each foot in turn. 

His hands she didn’t dare rub to warm, but she held his left hand between her hands for a few minutes and then she reached across him to do the same for his right hand. He had stray curls on his brow. He looked so odd, overgrown almost. Usually Stan put just enough gel in his hair to sweep the curls back from his forehead.

Patty sighed. “Your lips are chapped, Stanley. Give me a minute. I should have a chapstick in my bag.”

Ah, the bag, he would say. What’s in there, Mary Poppins? 

She dug through her purse, shoving aside the checkbook, her phone, the heavy book she’d been reading by that Denbrough guy. The book did it, heavy as it was: her purse slipped suddenly off her knees and spilled half its guts across the floor.

“Tiddlywinks!” Patty swore. She stood up and smashed the purse on the chair. Dropping to her knees, she scooped up change, cosmetics items, a thing of tissues, Zaxby napkins: all things she loaded into the crook of her arm. The chapstick had rolled under the hospital bed. Squinting and bending as low as she could, her back protesting, she flapped her hand under the bed two or three times then snagged the little plastic tube.

“A-ha!” she said, triumphant, and she sat upright and held the chapstick up so that Stan, asleep, could behold it.

Stan looked back at her. His eyes had focused. He looked right at her through the bars. Stanley looked at her.

Patty dropped all the things she’d picked up. The mirror and blush compact scattered and broke at the hinge. A pen bounced into a corner. The chapstick dropped from her fingers and landed in the cleavage fold of her blouse.

“Stanley?” she said.


	3. 1.2

###### 

The bird, a red-shouldered hawk, had caught a thermal air current rising up from the black asphalt road far down below. She rode it smoothly as she trailed the car moving about fifty miles per hour along the four lane pavetop, two lanes bearing southeast and two lanes headed northwest with a median of towering trees between the two. Morning had been good for the hawk. She’d gorged on a couple woodchucks and picked at the white meat of a snake till the crows had come and started a racket. 

Now she followed the car as it followed the slight curvature of the road. An irregular stream of cars came going the other way, on the far side of the trees. This car drove alone and it drove along the inside lane. The hawk drifted lower then caught on another shoot of hot air radiating up; and banking, she curled higher again on her outspread wings, brown and white-striped, three feet wide stretched as far as they’d go. 

As she did so she saw some fractional movement in the grass running alongside the road, on the other side of the guard rail. A fat mouse, she would’ve gandered if a hawk did a thing like gander. She’d ate a hell of a lot already that day but her hawk’s brain told her when’s food gonna come again? Eat yourself a nice, juicy, fat mouse and might could be you take a rest for a little while today before coming out again in the afternoon.

But the crows had insisted, cawing and cursing and saying maturin, maturin. Big crows too, the hooded one with wings longer even than her own, else she would’ve flown at them just to get them to shut up a bit. She was still thinking about that mouse, now some hundred yards behind her, when the car suddenly lurched to the right, cutting across the empty lane and bucking up over the rumble strips. It braked noisily before it drove on through the guard rail. 

The hawk circled. She circled again, wings tilting at an angle so she could keep the wind underneath her.

The driver’s side door of the car popped open. It disgorged a woman with distracting hair, pale and catching up sunlight. She slammed the door behind her and stood there then, trembling. The hawk saw all this. Her wings tired; she had to flap to stay aloft, and so she pushed on to the trees running along the side of the road, just past that guard rail.

The hawk couldn’t see how the woman stood by the car with her legs shuddering under her. Calves tight, knees tensing, like a runner about to spring on to the track. Another car was coming up the road. The woman turned her face away. She shuddered again. Then she went around the front of her braked car and stepped clumsily over the guard rail, holding on to the sun-hot metal with her hands to get over it. 

She stood again, facing the trees. Her face shone. She was crying. The hawk watched. The woman screamed once. A second time. The hawk twisted her head about, curious. 

A man came out the passenger side back door. He walked stiffly. The woman had sat on the guardrail and cried into her hands. Coming alongside her, the man reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out a square of white cloth and gave it to the woman, who took it without looking at him and used it to cover her eyes.

The hawk’s attention shifted. A figure was moving like a shadow between the trees. Her brain, complex for a bird’s but not so complex as a crow’s, could not comprehend what it was she saw. A man. A bird. 

Her feather crest began slowly to stand up. She arched her wings from her back. She called: sharp, clean cry. The thing in the trees called back at her. It was a chucking sound, one that rattled and went on like the belting song of a repeating gun. 

The hooded crow’s command ate at the hawk, and without thought for the creature’s largeness the hawk dove at it. Maturin, maturin! She cut like a knife through the hot and sweating May air, her wings pulled sleekly to her sides, her hooked beak open to tear and to rip and to spill hot blood; but like a shadow, it had gone.

The hawk flapped aggressively to halt her momentum, lest she plunge into the earth. Flapping, she landed on a low branch and turned her head furiously, tracking. A lizard wiggled underneath composting leaves. A pair of sparrows chattered at her then vanished as she turned an eye to them. Yes, like a shadow, it had gone. The crest at her head did not smooth.

On the road, the car engine turned over. It pulled off the roadside and onto asphalt again.

The hawk lingered there in the woods, long till her stomach complained and the sun had fallen deeply in its western procession. Still she did not move. She was waiting for it to return, the molting bird of the wood with its blue crest and flat human teeth. The eyes first, and then the throat. Her claws itched at the branch. She cleaned her wings.

The sun set. Among the trees, throughout the woods, the owls began to hunt. In a hospital in Atlanta, the body of Stanley Uris stirred.

  
  


She had texted them all after the nurses had come in to the room, following Patty’s shout and the call button she had pressed frantically not the once but three times. _Stan awake, not talking, eyes open and looked at me. Don come to hospital._

Patty checked her phone notifications out of habit. A stream of Facebook comments and messages, many from people with whom she hadn’t spoke in years. Gabriela Estada stood out. _Patty, I’m so sorry to hear Stan isn’t well. You know I always love you. If you want to reach out then you reach out, girlgirl._

In the hallway, pushed out by the nurses, waiting as she did for Ruth to return, Patty remembered with a piercing clarity: Saturday night out in late October sophomore year, Gab sporting huge hoop earrings, Patty in go-go boots, both of them half-drunk on cheap wine coolers and laughing as they staggered arm in arm across the quad. Red-orange-dust brown leaves skittering across the pavement before them. 

“Oh, shit, girlgirl,” said Gab, “we didn’t drink that much, did we?”

Patty put her nose up and sniffed. “We didn’t drink anything at all. You have to be twenty-one to do that. And we… are not that.”

Gab had sputtered laughter and clung to Patty’s shoulders, nearly knocking her over. Patty had laughed too, louder even, and Gabriela swinging her along had said, “Don’t you look now but that guy I told you about, he’s walking right over there.”

“What guy? A _guy_?”

“From my stats class,” Gab said, “you know, that guy. _Stan_. Jesus but he’s cute. No, Patty, don’t look! He’ll see us!”

Patty had looked.

The phone buzzed in her hand and Patty startled, her memories scattering out like mice from a feast as a bird dove among them. She answered without looking, good old habit at work again.

“Patty, it’s your mother. What do you mean Stan’s awake? Is he up? Is he moving around?”

Patty leaned forward slightly, her back yet to the wall. “No, Mom. He’s, um, he’s still in bed. He just woke up a little, but he wasn’t saying anything.”

“Did you ask? Did you try talking to him?”

“Yes, I tried talking to him.” She bit at the fatty inside lines of her cheeks to stop her tongue from cracking. “The nurses are in with him right now. Mom, you know he lost a lot of blood, and he’s been in the coma—”

“That doesn’t mean anything if nobody’s pressing him. You know that stranger things have happened than a man waking up from a coma.”

“You’re right,” said Patty, “it doesn’t mean anything. Mom, all he did was open his eyes and look at me, that doesn’t mean he’s really awake. They’ve got him on so many drugs for the pain and to stop infection that he—”

“Oh, don’t scold me,” her mother said. “He’s your husband. Shouldn’t you have more faith? And here I thought I’d have to talk you down from thinking it was all over.”

“Mom, I don’t want to fight.”

“We aren’t fighting, Patty,” Rachel protested, but Patty knew it was because of the morning, because of what she had said not just to her father but to her mother too. “Patty, please, this is just such overwhelming news. Of course it’s wonderful that Stan’s awake. But don’t talk yourself into a disaster.”

Another voice rumbled lowly. Patty tensed. 

“Yes, Herbert. Your father wants to speak with you.” She passed the phone off before Patty might protest.

“So, Stan’s up.”

Patty rubbed the first two fingers of her right hand across her brow. Her glasses crooked. “He’s not up yet. Not really.” She nudged the glasses into place again.

“Well, your text made it sound like he’s up again.”

“Well, he isn’t,” said Patty, “but the nurses are in with him right now. They’re going to do some tests. This might be just a false start.”

“He’s been doing better, hasn’t he? He wouldn’t quit on you yet if he knew any better.”

Oh, save her, she thought blinking harshly behind her glasses. She’d known her father hadn’t any love for Stan but surely even he would know when to shut up. 

Ruth came skidding around the corner, a plastic bag swaying violently from her wrist. Her face was red with exertion but her eyes pale, far too wide, and she looked at Patty like she thought Patty was the miracle awoken and not Stan in the hospital room. 

“I gotta go, Dad,” Patty said, “Ruthie’s here. I gotta go.”

“Do you want us to come up?” her mother shouted into the line. 

“Not in my damn ear, Rachel!”

“No, it’s all right,” said Patty, “the nurses don’t want too many people here anyway. Look, Ruthie’s here and I have to talk to her, so we’ll talk some more later when I’ve got more news to share. Please don’t post anything else to Facebook.”

“Your mother’s the one with the Facebook.”

“I just think the community should know—”

Patty hung up, as Ruth came trembling up to her.

“He’s awake?” 

She asked it in a little girl’s voice, sounding so like she had that first summer she’d come down to Georgia to stay the long months with Patty and Stan that Patty had another of those disorienting moments, memory flashing so brightly through her it was like a thing that had happened yesterday rather than years before.

“Kanga?”

Patty’s eyes were wet again after all. Damn all these promises she kept making that she wouldn’t cry anymore. All she did was break them.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know if he is, Ruth, I don’t know if, if he.” She cut off, choking on it, and Ruth dropped the bag to grab Patty’s hands and then take off her glasses so that when Patty did cry she wouldn’t muss the lenses. 

“I’m sorry,” she wept. “I’m sorry. I just can’t stop doing this.”

“Fuck sorry,” Ruth said, “Patty, he’s your Stan,” and she pulled Patty into her arms like Patty had hugged Ruth just half an hour ago. 

They were like that there in the hallway, Patty reduced to dry sobs as Ruth swallowed her own sniffles in long drags, when Don Uris came upon them. He’d made remarkable time.

“I was out,” he explained shortly when Patty brought it up. “I thought I would visit your temple.”

She couldn’t have got through a religious debate with Stan’s Orthodox father. Blessedly, a nurse stepped out of the room and said, “You can come back in, Mrs Uris.”

  
  


They took Stan from the room downstairs to another unit, to perform a round of diagnostic testing: a CT scan first then if this did not provide enough fine detail, and if insurance should allow it, a MRI. 

The doctor, a firm-faced older woman with grey-shocked hair, closed the door to the patient room and gestured for Patty and her supports to sit. By then, Donald Uris had driven up to join her and Ruth. He alone remained standing. Ruth sat beside Patty but on the cusp of her chair, so that she pressed very close to Patty. Their hands joined. 

“Well, I don’t know if I’m giving you good news or bad news right about now,” said the doctor. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit?”

“Thank you but no,” said Don. “I’m fine standing.”

Patty glanced at him. His face was drawn, eyes sunken, the expression of him unreadable: thrown up like a fortress.

“Suit yourself,” the doctor said, diffident. She turned to Patty. “Well, the physical exam gave us something to start with. Patellar reflex is still working, and he responded some to pain. Don’t worry. We just gave him a little prick in the elbow. Got a response. Not much, but a response.”

Patty clutched at Ruth’s hand, and Ruth squeezed gently. “He wouldn’t speak,” she said, hearing how tremulous her own voice came out of her mouth. “Even when we were looking at each other. It was like he looked at me but he didn’t see me.”

“And I can’t tell you what that was or what it means.” The doctor tried a smile. She looked a hatchet. “That’s why we’re doing this extra testing. Now I will tell you his responses to the light tests weren’t good. His pupils dilated and contracted, but he didn’t understand instruction and he didn’t follow the light.”

“So what do you think it could be?” Patty felt the bones in her hand creaking as she clutched at Ruth. “I mean. I know you’re doing more testing, but. He’s awake, right? He came out of the coma.”

“We won’t start to know until we get the results back,” said the doctor. “Now there’s a good neurologist working on the unit today, Dr Nassar, and he’ll be the one going over the results with you and letting you know if we have to do that MRI.”

“But you don’t have any ideas? Any guesses?” Ruth made a soft sound and flustering, Patty let go of her hand. She touched at her glasses. “I’m sorry. I know you aren’t supposed to— That’s not your job, to give maybes.”

“You do have ideas,” said Donald Uris.

The doctor hesitated. She looked between the two of them, glancing over Ruth, who had tucked her knees to Patty’s knees. 

“I’m not the neurologist,” she said at last. “And I’m no psychiatrist either. There’s a few things it could be. A dissociative fugue. A form of catatonia. But I have to tell you, we don’t know yet. We might not know today what it is, or tomorrow. But we will find out for you.”

Patty swallowed. Her teeth were dry, her tongue dryer. “Brain damage,” she tried to start; but her throat tightened, mortifyingly, and she had to lower her face. Ruth grabbed at her hand again. Then another hand touched Patty, a much larger hand, thick-boned but thinner now than it had been years before: Stan’s father rested his hand on her shoulder. She wanted briefly to throw them both from her; then she sagged under their offerings.

The doctor said, “Let’s get this testing done first before we start jumping into hot water.” If she’d reached to pat at Patty’s knee, Patty might well have screamed. But the doctor only stood and nodded quickly to them each and left the room, and as if he had waited for such a cue, Stan’s father took his hand away.

Ruth said, “I got a water in my bag.”

“No,” Patty said after a moment. “No, I’m all right. I’d just like to use the restroom a minute.”

  
  


The results of the CT scan were not available by the end of visiting hours. Even without these results, Stan would undergo the MRI in the morning. “Especially if his condition doesn’t change overnight,” said Dr Nassar.

By that hour Ruth had left in Patty’s car, with her blessing. Rachel Blum had pressed upon Ruth the need to see her youngest daughter. The sisters shared a common look.

“Go to the house first.”

“Why?”

Patty plucked at the hem of Ruth’s shirt sleeve. “To change.”

“Fat chance. If Dad hates it so much he can tell it to my face.”

The Rabbi Uris said, “We must honor our father and our mother,” and Ruth gave Patty a look as if to say: I’m going to say something. Patty shook her head. Then the rabbi said, “Even if it is foolish to take offense with so Christian a profanity,” and he folded his hands across his shrunken belly and leaned back in his chair.

Ruth said, “I _agree_ ,” in delight.

“You’re only wearing it to start trouble.”

“Alas, but I must go,” Ruth sang. “The parentals have summoned me. And I am a good Jewish daughter, who only shows respect to her father and to her mother.” She feigned a curtsy to Rabbi Uris and crossed her eyes at Patty. 

At the door, though, Ruth paused, and she glanced back at Stan sleeping again in the hospital bed. Then she left, keys in hand, the plastic bag swinging against her thigh.

So it was that Patty and Donald Uris drove back to 1001 Rivertree Drive in his small and eco-friendly car. They spoke little. What could be said? She had never entirely understood Stan’s stern and distant father, so unlike her own who blustered and sometimes showered great affection on you. 

He was not a man given to talk. Nor was he a man with whom conversation was ever easy. Patty leaned into the head rest and chose to watch the trees rolling past the windows as the rabbi drove. The sky had turned to dusk. Some scattered few birds moved between the trees. 

She closed her eyes. Her glasses, chunky plastic unlike Stan’s wire frames, jostled as the car leapt across a pothole. The worst of the traffic had passed, the rush hour gone. Still it would take a decent forty or forty-five minutes to leave Atlanta proper for the spread out green-pastured houses on the outskirts. 

This was where she and Stan had chosen to live. They had bought the old farmhouse in 2002 for “pennies on the dollar,” Stan said. 

“That’s a strange way to say seventy-five thousand!” Patty had protested. 

They were going through the house room by room making firm notes on what needed fixing: all of it. The distinction was whether it needed fixing now or sometime over the next decade.

“Darling,” said Stan, “Patricia Dorothy Blum—”

“Uris.”

“My Georgia peach.” He caught her by the waist and turned her into a spin, one that led her neatly up against him with his arm around her waist and his other hand holding her wrist. He brought her hand up to kiss the back of it. “Have a little faith. How many acres do we now own?”

“How many acres of trees and sweet-gum balls and kudzu?”

He smiled and let her go. The moment’s romanticism faded. He was practical again as ever. “It needs work. But that isn’t really a bad thing. It’ll keep us busy on the weekends.”

“Those weekends I wanted to spend with my husband?”

“Well,” he said, “I’m sure we can find a reasonable arrangement. One that suits both parties.”

Patty had wound her fingers in his sweater vest and tugged him closer. He was practical-minded, her Stan, but she did so like her some romance. 

“Are you an accountant or a lawyer?”

Plainly, slow blinking behind his thin glasses, Stan said, “Your husband.”

The asphalt changed texture beneath the wheels. Cobblestone replaced it. Patty opened her eyes again to behold their house. Here is where Stanley and Patricia Uris live. My, isn’t it a fine house? Two stories tall with a little attic, all of it made of brownish-red brick. With the lights on in the upstairs windows it fair near shone in the coming evening like a house on a watercolor card.

The emptiness of it bore down on her. Donald pulled into the separate garage house. Patty’s car gleamed darkly in the other spot. 

In the morning, she thought, I’ll know. HaShem, tomorrow, let me know what is true.

She looked across the small spaces of the car at Stanley’s father. Once he was a large man. At their wedding he had stood square and huge, his jaw a broad thing. Time had sunken him. He’d more jowl now than he had then, and his clothes did not fit so well.

The other day a teacher friend of Patty’s had come by the house to offer condolences, a hot casserole, a disposable plastic container of brownies. “I don’t normally bake kosher,” said Hilary, “so if it didn’t come out all right, I’m awful sorry about that.” The thin gold cross at her throat glinted in the sunlight spilling through the windows over the sink.

Some nasty thing in Patty, knowing Hilary was Catholic, had thought, _you think my husband’s going to hell now._

In the car she said to Rabbi Uris, “Is it unforgiveable? What Stan tried to do?”

Stanley’s father looked back at her. His face was cast in deep shadow, by the bones of his face and the darkness of the garage.

“You think it’s a sin,” she said. “Would you give him rites? Or a eulogy? I know that you’re Orthodox and we’re Reform, but. He’s your son.”

The rabbi turned the key. The car shut off. He sat there a moment with his big, aged hand on the key. Then he pulled the key out.

He said, “I follow the halakha. The commandments as given to Moshe Rabbenu—”

Her ears rang with stillness. Patty nodded. She nodded and said, “Thank you. That’s all. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Thank you. Thank you for driving us to the house. I’d like to visit alone tomorrow morning. Thank you,” and she opened the passenger side door and she got out and she closed the door and she went out into the night to go into her home without looking back even the once.

It was unfair of her to compare Donald Uris to Hilary. It was unfair, too, to have thought Hilary would think such a thing. Who was Patty to know if Catholics still condemned suicides? She did not follow their pope. Their laws were not her laws to mind.

Dishes sat stacked in the sink, only two plates, a pair of knives, a fork. An empty, frosted glass stood on the counter. Put the dishes in the washer! Then her temper fled her.

Ruth was in the downstairs guest room, sitting cross-legged on top of the bedspread with three books open before her, a journal, a notepad, a kindle. She’d earbuds in. Seeing Patty entering the room, Ruth took one out and said, “What’s the word, hummingbird?”

Patty climbed on to the bed next to Ruth, mindful of Ruth’s work. Ruth scooted and said, “Hey there, Kanga,” softly.

“No word,” said Patty. She curled up at Ruth’s hip with her head half-on a pillow. “What are you working on?”

“Thesis,” said Ruth, “what else?”

“Tell me.”

Ruth wiggled lower on the headboard, so that Patty’s head was nearer to her breast than her hip. 

“You remember Grandma? Okay, so, she had that story she told about the old woman who lived in the stove. The kikimora.”

Yes, Patty remembered this story.

“So, the kikimora, she lives in Russia. She’s a dark spirit or sometimes she’s friendly, but she lives in the house. She sits on your chest and strangles you. So that’s in Russia. But then out of Poland, and of course Poland is one of those Slavic countries too, there’s the lantukh and the lantukh is a Jewish spirit. Not that the lantukh is Jewish but that stories about the lantukh are told by Jews.

“The lantukh lives behind stoves like the kikimora,” Ruth said, “but the lantukh is, um, more of a house spirit. He, or she, or whatever, they look after the people in the house. Sometimes they make practical jokes, but they care about the house and the people inside it. And that’s not all I’m writing about, but it’s neat, right? How our monsters change like that? The kikimora eats your breath but the lantukh makes broth when you’re sick.”

Patty hummed, thinking. “You’re so smart, Roo,” she said. “Stan would be so proud.”

“He will be proud,” said Ruth. “That’s what you mean.”

“Yes,” said Patty. She sat upright. She swung her legs off the side of the bed. “Yes, that’s what I mean. You’ll let us read it once you’ve finished writing it?”

“If it’s any good, yeah,” said Ruth. “Patty. Patty, he _will_ be proud.”

The floor overhead creaked. Donald Uris readied for bed in the guest room upstairs.

“Good night, Ruth,” said Patty. She blew her little sister a kiss. It stung her to give it.

  
  


She slept. She did not sleep. She dreamed. She did not dream. She remembered. Was it a memory? It was a dream. Was it a dream? It was:

They sat side by side each on a separate orange vinyl chair with a foam padded seat. Their knees stuck out straight. Her hands were folded the left over the right in her lap. Stan’s hands were folded the other way. They stared at the far wall. The wallpaper was off-white with a cherry print. A bright red molding ran along the ceiling and the floor where the wall ended. 

At the center opposite was a clock. The face of the clock was blank. It had three hands of identical length. Beneath the clock was a lacquered brown table with a white laminate top. A vase of flowers stood beside a wicker basket of magazines. The magazines had titles like MOMMY & ME or CHICK CHICK CHICKADEE or HERE COMES MR STORK. To either side of the table more chairs stood. They went on in endless lines to the left and to the right. The clock ticked. One of the hands moved forward. One of the hands moved backward. One of the hands didn’t move at all.

She said, “You and your father, you’re just too much like each other,” with a laugh. 

“We aren’t,” said Stan. “We aren’t! He’s an asshole, and I’m— I’m not that.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“You don’t mean that I’m an asshole? That I’m too particular?”

Their heads would not turn. This isn’t right, she thought. We had this fight when we were still dating and that was years before we went to the clinic. 

“I didn’t say that. I wouldn’t ever say that.”

“Why wouldn’t you? It’s true. Stan puts everything in order. Stan doesn’t like to eat out because they don’t wash their dishes the right number of times. Stan doesn’t laugh at any jokes. He doesn’t high five his friends. He doesn’t have any friends. No one can stand him.”

“Why are you saying these horrible things?”

“Aren’t they true?”

“No! They aren’t true!”

Patty realized that they were sitting opposite of themselves. How had she not seen so before? A younger Patty with black dyed hair sat on one side of the table. A younger Stan with a bony face sat on the other side of the table.

“Go on and say it,” that Stan taunted that Patty. “I know you’re thinking about it. I’m a loser. I heard your roommate say it.”

“Then you heard me tell her to shut up! That she shouldn’t say something like that about you!”

“Well, what do you think? You say yes, Stan and I like that, Stan and if that’s all right with you, Stan. I’m not glass. You can tell me to fuck off.”

“I don’t want you to fuck off,” that Patty snapped at that Stan, “even if you’re an asshole! And you’re being an asshole right now! You’re being a real jerk, Stanley.”

His teeth flashed. “Just like my dad. Just like my dad, right? Go on, Patty. Come on. You can tell me.”

“Stop putting words in my mouth. I hate it when you do that.”

“I hate when you pretend you aren’t angry,” said Stan. “I hate when you pretend like I’m not a fucking douchebag.”

“And I hate it when you curse. I hate it that you think there’s something wrong with me!”

He gentled suddenly. “I don’t think that.”

“Yes, you do,” Patty bit. “You think I’m too nice. You think I’m a pushover. You think I just let people walk all over me. Well, I don’t! But you don’t pay any attention. You’re so worried about being like your father that you forget I’m a person too so how about forget it. How about get lost! How about you do fuck off!”

“Yeah,” said Stan. “I thought so.”

“You don’t get to tell me how I feel,” she cried out at him. “You don’t get to say I told you so or I thought so. If I’m mad, and I’m mad, then it’s because you think you can push me away and if I go then you can tell yourself you knew I’d leave, but you don’t pay attention so you don’t even see that it’s you doing it.”

The clock chimed. The other Patty froze. The other Stan froze.

Patty turned her head. She was allowed to do so now. Stan turned his head too. Blue-grey feathers stippled his face. They were the sorts of feathers a new-hatched chick sported, stiff and yolk-wet, like pine needles almost in the way that they stood out angled from the flesh which was red at the base of each feather. 

“I let you in,” said Stan.

A great sorrow hurt her. 

She said, “You didn’t. Not really. I thought you did. But you were pushing me away the entire time.”

“I let you in,” he repeated. “You came in farther than anyone else ever came in. After Derry.”

“What was in Derry?”

He said, “The badness is in Derry.”

She said, “What’s the badness?”

He said, “I can’t tell you.”

“See? You won’t let me in. You just won’t. You never did.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t understand. I never figured it out. How to tell you. But if I told you then the badness would get into you too. It got into me.”

She leaned forward and kissed him. She was allowed to do that too. His lips bristled with fine, sharp bristles. More feathers, breaking through the dusky flesh. 

“You’re good,” Patty told him fiercely. Her lips bled, very lightly. The bristles had cut her. “You’re a good man, Stanley. You’re the best man I’ve ever known. You’re my husband.”

“There’s a badness in Derry.” He sounded like a boy. “It’s bad like a sickness is bad. Like a disease in the soil. They used to put lead in paint. And I think the lead got in me when Judith kissed me. Yuh. The badness got in me. It didn’t get into anyone else because they stuck together but they forgot about me and that’s how I got it inside of my blood.”

Patty pulled her legs onto the chair. The vinyl creaked beneath her. Her left sandal fell off. The air was cold against her foot, too cold for summer and too cold for air conditioning. Cold like winter up north. 

“There is nothing bad inside of you, Stan.” She clutched his feathering face in her hands. “Stan, I won’t ever forget about you. I won’t leave you behind, I promise you. I promise it to you and HaShem and, and those damn crows behind the house, I won’t leave you.”

“You have to,” said Stan. “Babylove, where I’m going, that’s not someplace you can follow.”

“Where?” She cried. Tears made her face burn neat as lines of fire. “Where are you going? Stanley, don’t you go without me.”

The phone rang. They looked down at it. The table was now between them. In place of the wicker basket was a plastic green rotary dial telephone. A single magazine was splayed across the table. The cover read 20 REASONS YOU’LL NEVER HAVE THAT BABY, PATTY. RUTH IS ALL YOU GET. ASK STAN WHY! The phone rang again.

Stan leaned away from Patty. He said, “I better answer that.”

She plucked the handset as he reached for it. 

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“This is the Derry Townhouse confirming Stanley Uris’ continuing rental,” said a woman on the other end of the line.

“He doesn’t have a reservation,” Patty said. “He isn’t going anywhere. He’s right here with me.”

“Oh, no, ma’am, I’m sorry to hear that. Stanley Uris has been here with us for quite a while. If you’d like I could patch you through to them. But I have to warn you, he’s with a visitor.”

“You’re wrong.” 

Her lips were cold. Her fingers were cold. Her breath as it gusted between Patty and Stan was a cloud of white mist turned to ice that flaked like snow to the table. Stan’s face existed in shadow. The feathers had grown and thatched out. They masked him.

“You’re wrong, I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re wrong, my husband is right here with me.”

“I’m afraid he isn’t, Patricia Dorothy,” said the woman. “He’s with the Kingfisher now. Don’t you think it’s time for you to wake up?”

“Now listen to me!” Patty shouted into the phone; and her husband fully feathered and newly yolked said in a voice terrible and strange, “Now Derry does call, ayuh, so she does, Derry of the ice and Derry of the owl and Derry of the kingfisher song,” and as he rose from the chair a vast shadow spilled across Patty who gazed unmoving and rabbit-frightened at the thing that burst from Stanley’s flesh, and over the phone a woman said, “Patty? Patty? This is Beverly Marsh. I’m one of Stan’s friends, from childhood. From Derry. Patty, can you hear me? Do you remember me? Patty? Hello?”

The feathered thing as it towered took the phone out of Patty’s hand. He placed the handset on its hooks. 

Patty whispered, “Who are you?”

The Kingfisher answered, “ _Patricia Dorothy Blum_ ,” and she woke alone in the dark of her room with a scream in her throat as surely as if someone had blown a calling horn into her ear. 

Derry, she thought mindless as an ant. Derry. Derry. There’s a badness in Derry. Yuh. _Patricia Dorothy Blum_ and she stumbled barefooted out of bed and then wavered there on her feet. She held her face in her hands. She did not dare move until at last her head had cleared. Then she slid her fingers down her face. She looked at her fingers. Faint red spots showed on them. Her lips had bled.

  
  


1001 Rivertree Drive slept, all but for Patty Uris who walked alone in that night dark down the hardwood steps. The wood was slick. She held to the banister. The steps terminated outside the kitchen. There she paused. She looked a long moment into the clinging shadows of the kitchen till her eyes had adjusted to its peculiar darkness. The cellar door was still shut. 

In Stanley’s study she turned on the desk lamp and went to the shelves of books. The bookcase was built into the wall beginning at waist height. Everything below was cabinets.

Into their marriage Stanley had brought a childhood copy of _Birds of North America: A Guide to Field Identification_ , published in 1966. The spine had cracked in five long, white lines. On the inside cover Stan had printed his name in pencil: a child’s uneven scrawl. 

She had tucked the letter between sparrows. Shucked of its envelope, it was only two sheets of yellow notepad paper. The other letters, addressed to people with such names as Michael Hanlon and Richard Tozier and Beverly Marsh (I’m one of Stan’s friends, from childhood), Patty had thrown into the fire safe and locked inside. She could not have articulated why she had done so only that she did not want anyone to know that he had slit his wrists with intent, that he had chosen to die, that he had done this after sitting down to write seven letters and not once had he said a word to his wife.

Now Patty took the letter he’d addressed to her from the sparrows. She sat in the leather wheeling chair at the desk. The book, she closed and set aside next to the desk calendar.

_Babylove_ , the letter started. She had read it only once before. Her hands shook. The papers shook with them. Patty laid it flat on his desk and smoothed her hands across the pair of sheets, over their trifolds, over the thin indentations the pen had made as he wrote. 

_Babylove,_

_I’m sorry that I did this to you. There’s a way to explain it but I just haven’t figured out how yet, and now I don’t have any time. Maybe I forgot how much time I had, but saying that would be telling a lie. We swore we wouldn’t lie to each other. I knew. But I didn’t want to know. If you tell yourself often enough that you forgot, you start to believe it._

_I never forgot. And there are some truths I never told you. When I was a kid in Derry some people died. Kids died. My friends and I, the Losers, we stopped the killings. Bet you didn’t know your Stan was a Loser. That’s with a capital L._

_There are whispers in my head now that haven’t been there since we moved out of Maine. It isn’t my medication and it isn’t my illness. It’s … It. I figured out how to stop the nightmares but now I can’t get rid of them. And I could tell you everything I remember, everything I know about It, but none of that will matter in a short while._

_This isn’t because I’ve lost my mind. I am entirely sane. I have always been sane. That’s the trouble and it always has been the trouble. And for reasons too difficult to explain to you, this is the most logical choice to make. In chess if you want to take your opponent’s queen, you have to sacrifice your own pieces._

_But I don’t think that matters to you right now._

_Here are the things that matter to me, right now. I love you, Patricia Dorothy Blum. I won’t say the happiest day of my life is the day I first saw you when you were staggering across the quad in those green boots. I won’t say it was the day we first kissed, or the day we married, because the truth is that the happiest I have ever been in my life is when I have known you. From start to finish._

_I love you. I love you._

_You’re going to find my body and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for everything that will come after that. But this was the right choice to make and it’s the choice I made, and I made it because I’m afraid and I’ve never stopped being afraid and what they have to do now to stop It, they can’t do if I’m there and full of doubt. You have to have faith to stop something like It, and I lost faith when I was still a kid._

_Hold on, babylove. Be strong. Keep faith. Don’t be afraid. Don’t forget._

_I was so afraid you’d leave me. Now I’m leaving you._

_Babylove. Babylove. Babylove. Babylove._

_Yours. Just yours.  
Stan._

Patty lifted the sheets, one in each hand, and alone there in the thin lamp light of the study, she pressed the papers to her face and breathed deep, trying to find Stan hidden in the ink smells, the notepad paper, the clinging vanilla scent of the bird watcher’s book. She thought, Where are you, Stan? Where? How do I find you again? 

None of his smell stuck to the sheets. Not even the sharp burnt wood musk of the cologne he’d worn that night Mike Hanlon of Derry had called.

She lowered the sheets and looking at his writing, at her husband’s writing, Patty became aware that someone stood just outside the glass-paned doors that led from the study to the hallway. The hair on her neck stood on end. The hairs on her arms stood too. 

It was breathing, the thing outside the doors. Then it hummed, a flutish sound, and she heard the ticking of its long wet fingers against the hinges of the door she’d left open, the door she had stupidly left open. The cellar door had been shut. She had looked at it and seen that it was shut. 

A pressure built in her ears. It felt to her like plunging into the deep end of the pool after taking too thick of a breath into your lungs. Her ear drums were like to pop. A sudden dizziness rushed over her. It rose up from her feet and flooded inside her head. 

If she looked. If she were to look. She clapped a hand over her eyes.

The thing at the door sang flutely again. Come, come. Dance, dance. Here I am now. Here I’ve come. Look at me, look at me.

“El melekh ne’eman.” The words burst out of her, jumbled and out of order. In terror she reached for what she knew truest. “Impress them upon your children.”

Come, come, come, dance with me now, I am the lead, I am the paint, I am the badness come from Derry, said the thing in the doorway: I live in your home, I live in your heart, I live in your stove, I eat the ashes from your hearth and the grain from your bread, come to me, come to me, come to me.

“Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Hear, O’ Israel,” she said, licking at her crusted lips. All the words were tumbling sideways. This, the first prayer she had learned. 

Come to me! Come to me! Stanley came! He my own! I ate of his blood; I ate of his bread; I ate of his body and bone. I am the shadow and I am the ghost and I am the kikimora and I am not yours but you are mine. The thing in the doorway played its light woodwind and the notes said dance with your feet, dance with your hands, dance with your spine bending back further now yes further yes dance and so bending touch your fingertips to the floor behind your feet.

HaShem, HaShem, Patty prayed, HaShem name of my god I do not speak. “I will grant the rain. I will provide grass for the cattle. Blessed is the name of his glorious kingdom for ever and ever,” she sobbed. “Hear, O’ Israel, blessed is the name. Impress these my words upon your very heart, _blessed is the name of his glorious kingdom for ever and ever._ ”

The sheets of paper fluttered from the desk. The flute had gone silent. She looked quickly to the door. Nothing stood there. Perhaps nothing ever had.

Her heart beat. It beat like a dove trapped in a pair of hands. The hands tightened. Still the bird struggled. Patty sat in the chair. She reached fumbling for something to hold, a ward between her body and the yawning darkness of the house. The book on the desk, _Birds of North America_ : she clutched it to her chest.

  
  


Alone Patty went to the hospital that morning. 

First she looked in Ruth. Ruth slept well, surrounded by her ephemera. 

She stood outside the door to the guest bathroom upstairs. Donald Uris performed his ablutions. 

She did Shema Yisrael and she did it properly sitting on the little bench out back under the great oak tree where the hooded crow nested. The birds cawed hoarsely to one another. Sparrows made sweet noise. 

Then she went to the hospital. She left the radio silent. Dawn had come hotly to Atlanta. So too did the morning sting with sweat. Patty permitted the aircon to push cool air throughout the car. Her skin pricked with the memory of winter ice, out of place in sweltering Georgia. 

The nurses knew her. They smiled to see her. She smiled. Good morning. How are you, darling? Glad to see you up and about. Oh, gracious, hon, did you get any sleep? 

“I’m just here to see Stan,” she demurred.

Oh but of course. Let’s get you on the ward. Here’s your visitor’s badge. You remember if you need any water, just ask and we’ll grab you something from the nurse’s station. Don’t you put a dime in that vending machine.

“That’s very kind, thank you,” she said, clasping a hand in good friendship.

The ward smelled as it always smelled, so sterile. Her dream had smelled like that too. Her footsteps sounded quietly beneath her. She’d worn mustard yellow woven flats, with sheer ankle stockings rather than socks.

“A real Southern lady,” Stan would tease as he peeled those stockings off her sweaty feet, though she fussed at him for doing it. Stan, my feet! 

She knew his room by heart. She was thinking of the MRI. The nurse at the desk had told her the doctor would be by shortly to speak with her about the CT results. Patty thanked her and knew from the nurse’s clean smile that the CT offered nothing.

Voices came out of Stan’s room. She moved quicker. Her knees pumped. The heel of her right shoe came loose from her foot. 

A woman said, “Oh, Stanley,” in a voice like a breaking heart.

Patty glided into the room, curving the corner. A very pale woman with a shock of shoulder-length red hair bowed over the hospital bed. Her hand trembled over Stan’s face. A tall, broad man with a tidy beard had his hand on her back and a hand at his own mouth. 

Patty said, “Excuse me, but who are you?” She didn’t sound at all polite. She sounded, frankly, like a woman accusing them of something wicked.

The woman turned. Her hair flashed. Her eyes flickered bright with tears, unshed.

She said, “Patricia Uris?”

A shiver of unreality pinched at the delicate nerves of Patty’s spine. Patty stared at the woman. She was beautiful, unearthly beautiful, like something out of a fairy tale.

She dashed at her eyes with a hand. The man moved his arm around her shoulders. He looked shyly at Patty. Who are you? she thought. Who are you? 

Stanley had printed their names so very neatly on the envelopes.

“I’m Beverly Marsh,” said the red-haired woman. “We spoke on the phone.”

“And I’m Ben,” said the man. “Ben Hanscom. We’re friends of Stan’s, from—”

Patty said, “From Derry,” and she sat in the chair by the door without any feeling in her legs and a great shadow, it seemed, falling across her.

  
  


Patty Uris is driving about fifty-one miles per hour along the four lane pave-top on the lane nearest to the wooded median that separates two lanes from two lanes. 

Herbert Blum sits in the passenger seat. He dislikes not driving. Her mother is in the back seated alongside Donald Uris. They are discussing the weather. Rachel hopes for sun but Herbert insists the weather app predicts rain. 

What does Donald think, Rachel would like to know. 

If the meteorologists predict rain then it is likely rain, Donald says. 

Rachel laughs. Oh, you boys are teaming up on me.

Only Patty, who is so attuned to her father with the wariness of the fox that knows the hound is out, hears it when he mutters, “Let’s hope it does not rain for the kevura. The bastard would make sure of it.”

I am going to drive the car into a tree, thinks Patty. The thought comes to her with cobra-striking clarity. She sees it very clearly. She will turn the wheel just so and she will press her sandaled foot on the acceleration just so and she will set the nose of her little reliable Honda forward to impact. The car will punch into the trees of the median. The trees will punch through the car. She does not know if the airbags will inflate. Anyway, an airbag can only do so much. If she goes fast enough. If she aims the car with precision. 

Does a suicide go to hell? There is no hell, Patty thinks, and there is no heaven, there is only olam haba, and the resurrection of the dead. Who will be resurrected? The righteous, the suicides? Leave it to Adoni; he will know.

Yes, she thought. Yes, I will do this. Yes, I will. 

And she turns the wheel and takes the car across the asphalt lanes and brakes it at the guardrail on the outside. 

“Patty, what is this? What’s wrong?” asks Rachel.

She unbuckles her belt. She opens the door. She pitches herself without looking out of the car and slams the door behind her and there she stands with her legs trembling like the fox’s legs tremble, her calves flexing and poised. She is an animal. She will run.

Another car approaches. Patty does not leap before it, no longer a fox but a deer. She walks instead to the front of her car and around it. The guardrail is dull grey and highway dusted. She climbs uneasily over it. 

She is crying. She is crying so her stomach hurts with it. More trees face her, taller trees and older too than those planted in the median some years ago after a hurricane, after road repair. 

When she screams, it does not echo. The trees swallow it. She screams again. A hawk calls. She sits on the guardrail and weeps. 

A car door opens. She ignores it. If her father comes to her, then let her god forgive her but she will turn on him. 

The man is not her father. She knows this by the sound his feet make as they step over gravel. Donald Uris offers her a handkerchief from his pocket. It is embroidered with _uris._ She does not look at him but she takes the linen and she covers her face with it so that the rest of her tears will be hidden.

This is, for Patricia, the beginning of the second longest day of her life. The first she lived this past Shabbat, after she had found her husband bleeding out in their bathtub. She will think, surely the days cannot all be like this. Surely there must be an easement.

But it is true, this: 

Summer has only begun. These are not yet the longest days.


	4. interstitial i.

###### 

The white storks moved through the water on legs long and starkly pink. Long ripples spread out around them. It was dark down there, in the catacomb world underneath Derry, but light shone dim and silver out of the air it seemed and nothing else. 

The cistern had filled with rainwater, a dilution; or the sea had come in; or it was just that in a place such as this where only birds and the dead walked, the water simply came. Roots worked across the walls.

A common sparrow landed on his shoulder.

“Please go away,” said Eddie Kaspbrak. Water fell out of his mouth as he spoke.

The sparrow shivered its wings and said in a high sweet voice, “Can’t yet. Have to chat. Heard the word, little bird?”

“Fuck you,” said Eddie.

“Rude!” said the sparrow. “That’s rude. Have to say! Came to tell!”

Eddie reached up and closed a fist around the bird. It let him do this. His arms moved slowly now. That was because of the yawning hole that ran from his back to his front. Water poured out of that, too: clean water, fresh-chilled water, dark dark dark.

“Do you have to be like this every time I see you?” 

He crushed the bird pleasantly. The little head popped out between his first and middle fingers. It swiveled to tip an eye toward him.

“Rude and rude,” said the sparrow. “Mean little bird. Ugly mean thing.”

Eddie gave the bird a tight smile and slapped his other palm on that head. The bird’s head popped like a bubble might pop.

One of the storks walking by him turned its head, opened its long thin beak, and said in that same voice, “Eat shit, Kaspbrak.”

“No, you eat shit. I’m tired of this, this fucking—” 

He flung his hands out wide. No bird entrails to see here, folks! He wished he had tiny guts to hurl at the stork.

“What is this place, a waiting room? Did I not suffer enough to gain one free ticket to heaven?”

“You’re a real obnoxious little bird,” said the stork. “What if I told you that you had to eat shit first?”

Eddie flipped it both middle fingers. “Eat that, dickwad.”

The stork clacked its beak three times and turned to stalk deeper into the darkness. Eddie kicked water after it. He felt at the slit in his cheek. The edges were clammy, bloated and cold. Like a dead guy’s skin, he thought. Some guy that drowned and they just dredged his body up.

Something very light touched his head. He cringed from it. The sparrow simply nested in his hair.

“Got to say,” said the sparrow. “Kingfisher.”

“No.”

“Say hello.”

“No way.”

“Kingfisher says come, bow,” the sparrow sang. “Kingfisher says hungry.”

“Yeah? The Kingfisher can eat shit too. That’s what I say. That’s what Kaspbrak says.”

When the sparrow spoke again it did so in a deep voice, a voice that made the dead bones in Eddie tremble like things struck with great force. 

“Kingfisher sits in root and nest, and Kingfisher waits to eat. Birds of the air and birds of the sea but not the birds of soil and earth: come, bow.”

Eddie sat in the water. He pulled his knees up to his waterfall chest. He said, “I’m not a bird.”

The sparrow said, “All dead things are birds,” and viciously it plucked hairs from Eddie’s head and flew on delicate wings after the stork; and in the darkness, alone, half-drowned and forgotten, Eddie Kaspbrak hid his face in the valley between his knees and shivered. The storks in their long procession parted about him. Each foot, brought elegantly high, made muted splashings as it descended. He shuddered and shrank and felt the water between his teeth, the water very clear, the water very cold.

Come along, Eddie, whispered the ripples. Come along now. The Kingfisher’s waiting with his hand out to you. 

“Go away,” he said. “Go away. Go away. Get the fuck away from me.”

Still the birds came quietly walking out of the dark and deeper, each passage buffeting him like a wave, as if they might with their walking make a current and that current would bear him on in their wake.

The thought of this made ripples in Eddie. He stood, stiffly. A stork some yards away looked at him. Another stork behind that one looked too. 

He turned his back on them and walked in the other direction, against the flow of the water; and the water did flow, and it flowed against Eddie, and as it flowed it was saying, Come along, Eddie. Come along, Eds. All dead things are birds and all birds bow to the Kingfisher. The Kingfisher waits. The Kingfisher's hungry.

COME ALONG, EDDIE.


End file.
